The Elsevier Title Level Pricing: Dissecting the Bowl of Spaghetti from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication is timely as the UMass Amherst Libraries negotiate a new contract with Elsevier. Due to confidentiality agreements and variables by institution, pricing is opaque and a fair market value for each title is difficult to ascertain. By analyzing Elsevier journal pricing data provided by 5 academic libraries, the authors examine how Elsevier sets its pricing on individual journal titles for libraries that are leaving “Big Deal” packages in favor of individual journal subscriptions. They found significant variations in how final prices were determined for each institution which resulted in a range of average list prices and average cost per journal. Despite Elsevier’s pricing discrimination, each institution gained significant savings – an average of $889,400 – by moving from their Big Deal to a collection of individual journal subscriptions. This study provides other institutions who are negotiating with Elsevier data upon which to benchmark their calculations for better pricing and terms.
Category: Funding models
A new open access book model from Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press (CUP) is testing a new model, “Flip It Open,” to make books openly available after they have sold enough copies to achieve a revenue threshold. CUP has selected 28 titles for this program based on editorial conversations with authors. The books will be sold through CUP’s usual channels. Once each title has reached £8,000 in revenue, it will be made open access on the Cambridge Core platform. At that time a low cost paperback of the title will also be published. Both the digital and paperback versions of the book will include a list of libraries who have purchased the title to contribute to its conversion to open access. This model frees authors from paying fees and relies on libraries’ customary purchases to transition a publication to open access. The pilot will last 18 months and be assessed at its conclusion.
Calculating price, cost & impact of research articles
Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges is written by a group of biomedical scientists regarding the use of various metrics for publication assessment. It is important for librarians to keep in mind that social scientists usually do not approach research assessment in the same way that biomedical science departments often do. This article is focused on quantitative measures of quality rather than qualitative. The authors explore whether the increasing use of preprints and post publication review dramatically changes the quality of articles and how one might assess preprints which have not been peer reviewed before their publication online. The authors point out that higher cost of author processing charges (APCs) is correlated with higher Journal Impact Factor (JIF), which has apparently led to scholars viewing higher cost of publishing as a proxy for journal quality. Since neither the JIF nor the cost of APCs is an accurate gauge of quality, this is misguided. Higher APCs are also a barrier to authors working in less affluent countries, institutions, and disciplines. The authors examine the idea of downloads as a measure of article importance, but dismiss this given that it makes comparing OA and toll access articles impossible. The authors conclude that although there are many ways to calculate article or author impact, there is not a simply calculated metric to substitute for JIFs and H-indices, which is why they have such persistence.
Where scholarly communication and scholarly publishing diverge
In the realm of academia and scholarship, Jean-Claude Guédon, Professeur honoraire, Université de Montréal, Canada, has been my touchstone since becoming a scholarly communication librarian. His guest post, Scholarly Communication and Scholarly Publishing, on the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) blog delineates the divergence of the two. Knowledge production relies on an ongoing interrogation through rigorous, transparent processes. Before WWII, knowledge sharing through print publications was publicly subsidized because there wasn’t a commercial market for it. Commercial enterprises subsequently entered scholarly publishing and generated profits by expanding the global market with English as the primary language of discourse, making libraries the market for journals and creating competition for “value” through rankings and impact metrics. Gradually scholarly publishing’s purpose became revenue and profit generation above knowledge production and sharing. The journal and the “version of record” owned by the publisher became the primary commodity. As the digital age develops and matures, different possibilities emerge. Platform as a medium for scholarly communication offers alternatives to journals, versions of record, and commercial control over research commodities:
“A platform handles three relationships: between individuals and documents, between documents, and between individuals. A platform should be open to both readers and scholarly contributors with no financial barriers. A Platform is the site of open knowledge.”
Guédon notes that large sums of money are flowing from libraries, universities, funding agencies and private foundations and a good portion of this is going to profits for large-scale, international businesses. Once again, he advocates for re-allocating these funds to public platforms that support the needs of scholarly communication. He reminds us that scholarly publishing has not always been the purview of publishers controlling research commodities for the purpose of generating profits, and we have alternative platforms to return to scholarly communication for the advancement of knowledge production for public good.
Do commercial interests undermine open science?
In Open Science for Private Interests? How the Logic of Open Science Contributes to the Commercialization of Research, Manuela Fernández Pinto talks about commercial interests in the research itself and how those interests are promoted through open science. He makes the case that open science practices are not always in alignment with the open science ideals of transparency, sharing, collaboration and accountability. The open science movement generally applies to publicly-funded research but the vast majority of scientific research is either conducted (72%) or funded (67%) by businesses. The author identifies three known problems with privately funded research:
- Corporate sponsors can (and do, examples given) suppress research results in conflict with their interests;
- Financial conflicts of interest have a statistically significant effect on research results;
- Strong intellectual property rights give corporations control over research, with the power to both suppress research results and inhibit new research.
Those who participate in publicly-funded open research are strongly encouraged by various bodies to put no commercial restrictions on their works. Businesses are free to use and commercialize open research, while selectively applying open research principles to the research they sponsor. Pinto uses two case studies, publication planning and citizen science, to illustrate how business-funded research skews research and scholarly communication. The author provides compelling reasons for evaluating research sponsorship and potential conflicts of interest, and raises awareness of commercial interests in both promoting and suppressing research.
Supporting new open access business models
In the Scholarly Kitchen post, New Open Access Business Models – What’s Needed to Make them Work?, David Crotty provides his takeaways from “Making the Future of Open Research Work” at the third CHORUS Forum. Panelists were from Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), PLoS, Annual Reviews and MIT Libraries and a recording of the session is linked from this post. Crotty’s points:
- Incomplete author data creates a huge hurdle for publishers and libraries when libraries have contracts to provide funding for works produced by researchers from their organizations. Persistent identifier adoption, including ORCiD IDs and ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs, are keys to solving this challenge to library-funded open access.
- Usage data has been used as a metric for demonstrating value for subscribe-to-open funding models. Usage data for open access materials cannot be connected to institutions unless user affiliation data is collected. This violates user privacy which has been fiercely protected by libraries historically.
- To move to different funding models, organizations need to have an understanding of their finances. Currently publisher and library accounting systems lack the granularity of detail and the flexibility to support analysis and tracking of different and multiple financial models.
- There’s been a call for publisher financial transparency by Plan S, funders, libraries and others, seemingly in response to what are viewed as excessive profit making by some publishers. Crotty notes that publicly-traded businesses do disclose their financials and he questions why this is demanded of publishers and not other service providers.
Crotty gives a nod to libraries and universities underwriting or subsidizing publishing because it aligns with principles of open scholarly communication, but mostly he’s focused on models consistent with research-as-commodity and demonstrated value in market economy terms.
Seismologists push for diamond open access
The Seismica Initiative: towards a community-driven, Diamond Open Access journal for seismological research is a post on the European Geosciences Union blog that describes a response to a tweet from Nature announcing their author processing charge of €9,500/article (roughly $11,400) to publish open access. By contrast, Volcanica is a fully open access journal that has published 37 peer reviewed articles in the past 2 years without charging any author fees. Seismologists were inspired to create a task force to replicate this model for a diamond open access journal in their discipline. The post includes an excellent graphic (though not Creative Commons licensed) that illustrates the diamond open access space: free to authors, authors retain copyright, free to users and peer-reviewed. In the case of Seismica, the journal will be managed by members of the seismological community and “in the absence of any financial incentives, we ensure that the journal serves the needs of the community before anything else.” A researcher-driven, inclusive process is designed:
“to map out a route towards launching the journal that ensures a sustainable future. Core tasks include finding an administrative/financial host (a library or university press), identifying technical requirements for the manuscript submission platform and journal website, and acquiring the necessary funding.”
Volcanica, and potentially Seismica, give us examples of platforms for non-profit scholarly communication as envisioned by Jean-Claude Guédon.
Study of open access journals published without author fees
The “OA Diamond Journals Study” commissioned by cOAlition S is a robust work in multiple parts: findings, recommendations, references, journals inventory and dataset. It looks at the global landscape of an estimated 29,000 journals that are free for readers and authors. Only about a third of these are indexed in DOAJ and they represent diverse regions (45% in Europe, 25% in Latin America, 16% in Asia, 5% in the US/Canada) and disciplines (60% HSS, 22% science, 17% medicine). We don’t hear enough about them, perhaps because they are less common in the U.S. and Canada, less English-centric, and more often published by small, niche organizations. The majority of the journals exhibit academic rigor and conform to standards that make them compliant with Plan S. However, most depend on volunteers, governments and universities for funding. The recommendations focus on potential efficiency gains, collaborations, and principles-based action plans to secure non-commercial funding. As one who recognizes the barriers that author processing charges (APCs) create, I’m a fan of the Diamond OA and the financial models that support them. This study provides a useful and detailed landscape for understanding and planning for sustainable OA Diamond journals.
The SPARC Big Deal cancellation tracker
We’ve all heard of academic libraries cancelling subscriptions to “big deal” journal packages, and in the face of tightening acquisitions budgets, these cancellations are likely to accelerate. You can monitor which institutions have taken action with the SPARC Big Deal Cancellation Tracker. It provides institution/consortia, date, region, publisher, strategic considerations, outcomes and estimated cost savings. Strategic considerations generally include advancing open access and financial sustainability/flexibility. Other institutions’ actions provide useful guideposts to us as we develop our Framework for Publisher Agreements and renegotiate our big deal agreements.